Capital Flight From Afghanistan

One of the critiques I hear from people most often is that I’m too much of a generalist. Which is a fair point to an extent. But one thing you notice as a generalist is that sometimes people in one field manage to re-discover the mistakes that people in other fields made decades ago. And I think a lot of what’s wrong with counterinsurgency practice in the contemporary U.S. military can be understood as a massive exercise in repeating decades-old mistakes in development economics. For example, what happens when you flood a very poor country with money? If you think the answer is “it becomes rich” you ought to think harder:
Brigadier General Mohammed Asif Jabarkhel sits with folded arms in his office, just a few steps away from the security checkpoint at Kabul International Airport. “Of course I know what’s going on here,” the 59-year-old head of the airport’s customs police grumbles from beneath his thick moustache as a fan whirs in the background. “But, in this country, who’s allowed to speak the truth?”
Jabarkhel is referring to the huge amounts of money regularly being secreted out of Afghanistan by plane in boxes and suitcases. According to some estimates, since 2007, at least $3 billion (€2.4 billion) in cash has left the country in this way. The preferred destination for these funds is Dubai, the tax haven in the Persian Gulf. And, given the fact that Afghanistan’s total GDP amounts to the equivalent of $13.5 billion, there is no way that the funds involved in this exodus are merely the proceeds of legal business transactions.
The simplistic account of the problem here is that there’s “too much corruption” in Afghanistan. The more sophisticated account is that the prevailing economic logic of contemporary Afghanistan drives this behavior.

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Azam Ahmed has a report from Kabul’s ‘Car Guantánamo’ today:
Behind these walls are thousands of cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles and even bicycles, lined up in vehicular purgatory after falling afoul of the Kabul traffic police. Things that have landed cars in the slammer: illegal left turns, parking violations, involvement in fender-benders and, perhaps most egregious, failure to pay a bribe.

Kabul (AFP) - International aid was meant to transform Afghanistan's welfare standards, but orphanages in Kabul reveal that the most vulnerable children, many left parentless by war, have seen little benefit from the billions of dollars spent.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A man dressed in an Afghan army uniform opened fire Tuesday on foreign troops at a military base, reportedly killing a two-star American general and wounding 15 people, among them a German brigadier general and “about a dozen” Americans, authorities said.
JUST IN: Two-star U.S. general killed in Afghanistan "insider" attack, David Martin confirms— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 05, 2014

People constantly ask me what it would take for me to abandon my stance that "hyperinflation is not going to happen in the US".
My answer has always been "free money" (not credit), on a big enough scale. Note that QE causes huge economic distortions but it is not "free money".
Free Money Proposal
In Switzerland, enough signatures have been gathered to put a "free money" proposal on the ballot. To collect, all you have to do is breathe. Rich and poor alike would get the money.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — A U.S. military plane crashed Friday in Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian nation’s emergencies ministry said. There was no immediate word on any casualties.
Kyrgyzstan hosts a U.S. base that is used for troops flying into and out of Afghanistan and for C-135 tanker planes that refuel warplanes in flight.

THE MAN in the aisle seat was talking to me about the woman he liked to travel with. She would fly into JFK once a year and they would make their way to the West Coast; he would visit her home country of Iceland regularly and, when he wasn’t spending time with his in-laws, he’d spend it with her. He was silver-haired and silver-tongued.